An essay from our forthcoming place issue At her restaurant, Mosquito Supper Club, and in her cookbook of the same name, Melissa Martin sets out to record the foods and recipes that cannot be found on New Orleans’s restaurant menus… by Leslie Pariseau | Jul, 2020

Hunger for the Water

A feature essay from the Spring 2020 issue. I moved to Texas in 2017 and returned often to Dilley. When I would chat with residents—after a city council meeting, at the nail salon, before a cook-off—they’d ask if I was… by Emily Gogolak | Mar, 2020

An Intersection at the End…

A feature essay from the Spring 2020 issue. I wasn’t sure how to explain to a rising high-school junior why I’d followed her and her classmates to Belize. I’d met Pierre-Floyd a few months before during a tour of Frederick… by Casey Parks | Mar, 2020

Sense of Strength

A short story from the Spring 2020 issue I tell him goodbye and go wander around the beauty section in Dillard’s. I find the perfume like what I’m wearing on display and I spray some more on. I find a… by Ashleigh Bryant Phillips | Feb, 2020

The Virgin

A feature essay from the Spring 2020 issue. History is, in part, the memories we choose to protect and reinforce, to ensure their longevity and influence. In Thibodaux’s protected memory, sugarcane has endured, plantations have endured, Confederate heroes have endured—but… by Rosemary Westwood | Mar, 2020

Persons Unknown

A Points South essay from the Spring 2020 issue When we weren’t whizzing through intersections, I was trying to read road signs, thinking that their letters, dimly lit by our headlights, would give me some kind of orientation on this… by Malinda Maynor Lowery | Mar, 2020

Career Girl Meets Rock Star

A featured short story from the Spring 2020 issue. She stopped short. The dogs would have passed without noticing her, but Seth had to give them a parting yap. In a second they wheeled around and came straight at her,… by Ben Fountain | Mar, 2020

Cane Creek

 A Letter from the Editor, Spring 2020. Over the years, I have come to admire a certain kind of story that the Oxford American, as a quarterly magazine untethered from the demands of a rapid news cycle, is especially well… by Eliza Borné | Mar, 2020

The Messy Middle

We would like to hear from you.  The magazine will begin publishing letters to the editor in the fall issue and going forward. If you would like to respond to a story published in the magazine, we welcome your letter. by Oxford American | Jun, 2019

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Jeanine Michna-Bales

Jeanine Michna-Bales’s images from her Underground Railroad photo essay have appeared in exhibitions around the United States and are currently part of a traveling exhibition through 2022. A publication of the series, Through Darkness to Light, was released in April (Princeton Architectural Press, 2017). Michna-Bales was named to the Critical Mass Top 50 in 2014 and most recently in 2017.

All photos © Jeanine Michna-Bales
Eyes on the South

The Long Road to Freedom

December 12, 2017

In Through Darkness to Light: Photographs Along the Underground Railroad Jeanine Michna-Bales recreates the long voyage north toward freedom as it might have looked through the eyes of a single individual “oftentimes carrying little more than the knowledge that moss grows on the north side of trees.” These photographs of unpeopled rural landscapes, taken almost exclusively under the cover of descending or ebbing darkness, contain a sense of both intimacy and mystery, conveying “how vast, strange, and forbidding these remote places must have felt to those making the journey” with an almost painful steadiness of vision.

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